


Volta's Logs

by liquidCitrus



Category: PowerUp Heroes
Genre: Alternate Universe, Diary/Journal, Emitters, F/M, Genre Savvy, Log files, asynchronous storytelling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-05
Updated: 2012-04-05
Packaged: 2017-11-03 02:36:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 8
Words: 7,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/376162
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/liquidCitrus/pseuds/liquidCitrus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>I learned later that Malignance had managed to hijack several major TV stations in the greater Washington DC area and transmit the kind of stereotypical villainous world takeover speech that made me increasingly uncomfortably aware of the idea that maybe I was the one in that comic book situation.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Not as that bewildered observer staring through the windows, nor as the hapless civilian that needed to be rescued from the clutches of whatever stupid situation or villain of the week. I was the hero.</em>
</p><p>Louise Jamison sets off on a journey, and gets more than what she bargained for. Meanwhile, Robert Collins tries to come to grips with the power he's received.</p><p>Their stories are linked, by the Emitter that they share. Meanwhile, Malignance approaches...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue: The Radio Transmission

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for UCI's Writing 39B class, for the theme "The Hero's Journey".

2039 June 4

[intercepted transmission] [Destination: Sol-3]

_It doesn’t matter where I come from, or who I am. But you may call me Volta._

_Some time ago, Malignance revealed to me that he intended to exterminate the human race. I have no intention of letting that happen._

_This isn’t a secure channel, and I’m absolutely certain that Malignance is listening. Amplitude modulated radio waves aren’t advanced technology, but it was the only way I could be certain that you’d get this message, down there on Earth -_

_[burst of static]_

_He’s getting close. We’ll be at your planet in approximately three planetary rotations. I don’t know what will happen to me, but know that your species is, to me, worth any sacrifice._

* * *

2039 August 6

__

Log entry [text]

__

__

Well, today’s February 6, 2039, my name is Robert Collins, and hello, whoever’s going to listen to this entry, eventually.

__

__

Maybe you’re a hundred thousand years from now, or only fifteen. Maybe we’re still fighting against Malignance, or maybe we’re off to explore star systems, or maybe you’re the last hope for the human race against a bunch of zombies. Hey, I won’t judge. Although I don’t think the zombies are especially plausible.

__

__

I think the first thing I need to tell you, if you’ve just picked this Emitter up from someone and don’t know what you’re doing, is that yes, you’ve been given this thing for a reason, and yes, it’s bonded to you for the rest of your life. Sorry in advance, if I’m the one who gave it to you.

__

__

I’m the second face of Volta.

__

__

You want to know my story? I think I’ll need some time to put it together. It would be a good idea to have it here, as an inspiration to whoever picks up this thing after me.

__

__

Or, perhaps, a warning.

__


	2. Surface

2039 August 8

Log entry [audio]

Let me begin at the beginning.

What happened is there were these two guys from space who landed on Earth. I don’t know where they came from, they never told, but one of them wanted to destroy this planet and the other guy tried to save us.

Honestly, I’m not precisely sure of the gory details, but it seemed simple enough when I started. Good guy, bad guy, bad guy tries to end the world, good guy saves the world by capturing or killing the bad guy, ticker-tape parades and life goes on like normal.

Except it didn’t end that way. The good guy, the first Volta, decided that he would save the world by crashing his ship into the bad guy’s, Malignance’s, and forcing him to land instead of taking over the world via mind-control waves or some such nonsense. This at least crippled Malignance’s ship pretty much completely. Which, yes, that saved the human race. Sort of. But it also mortally wounded the first Volta.

Now, this normally wouldn’t be a problem if we were on Superhero Earth because then Superman or the Green Lanterns or someone would go flying in to save us from the horror from outer space, go punch him down for us, and award the guy from outer space a posthumous Medal of Honor. But of course we’re not on Superhero Earth, so the only actual superhero here in that situation was him.

And he was dying.

**\---- ******

At about the same time that day, right at dusk, I was going home to my apartment after work, and next thing I know, I’m pulling up to a police barricade and they’re telling me that the aliens who’ve been sending us radio transmissions have crashed. In my neighborhood.

My first reaction was disbelief. You know how nothing interesting ever happens to you, and then one day your little Chihuahua gets eaten by a mountain lion? It’s kind of like that. You freeze up and then there’s this moment where the only coherent thing that comes out of your mouth is “What?” and then it’s a long few minutes before you can get your tongue to work properly again.

So I’m standing there at the police barricade trying to argue with them that yes, I am carrying slowly thawing frozen burritos and cans of Fancy Feast and I need to get back home because I haven’t fed my cat in nine hours and she’s locked inside my apartment. And then there’s a streak of red light heading east, and a streak of orange light heading back down in the direction that the streak of red light came from.

I should probably mention, now that I know what it is, that the streak of red light was Malignance and the orange light was him dropping the Emitter down back into my neighborhood, presumably to recruit someone to finish off the nearly dead guy who happens to be Volta. But that’s a digression.

In any case, most of the police went motorcycling off in that direction, presumably to go chase after him (not that they’d catch him, he goes at 200 miles an hour easy), and in the chaos I ended up shimmying under one of the parked LA Police cars they’d used to form the temporary barricade.

Which, in hindsight, was an incredibly stupid thing for me to do. But at the time, all I was thinking of was that I really needed to get back before the ground meat was useless. Anyway, once I was under the car it was simple enough to crawl out of the way and into my apartment complex, where – true enough – there was a huge column of smoke and a dull green glow coming from the next compound over.

There was also a column of smoke rising from my apartment building, too.

Abandoning caution even more thoroughly than I had previously, I ran towards my building and found Volta lying in the dust, holding something out towards me. It was glowing.

You know, even with the benefit of a few months of hindsight, I still have no idea why I took the thing.

**\---- ******

The first thing I was aware of, when the emitter touched my skin, was that I wanted to put it in my breast pocket for safekeeping. The second thing I was aware of was that everything had turned blindingly white. All of my senses redlined for an agonizingly long moment, and then reality wobbled and snapped back into place.

I was hovering just above the ground, seemingly with no means of support, enclosed in a powersuit the likes of which I had never seen before. An HUD tracked my movements and drew steel-blue traces, labeling everything with statistics that I would take weeks to subsequently understand. More importantly, the ozone smell of electricity indicated that I now held several thousand volts of live electricity in my hands.

I spotted someone wearing a similar suit, a small distance away. And the smell of ozone intensified, and I brought my hands up to call a bolt of lightning from the heavens, and I brought it down.

And then time turned in on itself, and the next thing I know is that I was standing over Scorch’s prone form, and – perhaps on some sort of instinct – placing my hands on his chest, pulling the Emitter out.

And I crouched next to a car, a dead body on either side of me, and waited to be found.

  


* * *

  


2039 January 18

Log entry [audio]

Log entry of 2038 January 18, 21:03 UTC by Louise Jamison, in regards to the situation rapidly developing involving personal assistant designation [005-Max] in Plummers Canyon. Labels: Max comma EMP comma Plummers Canyon comma Titan surface work end labels. Originally imported from log system aboard the SS Feynman.

During routine geological testing of Plummers Canyon, Max uncovered an unusually uniform piece of rectangular rock, which upon further examination turned out to be made out of a kind of sedimentary rock, held together by – I wish I was kidding – what seems like a primitive sort of calcium oxide-based cement. Duly recorded discovery in logbook and transmitted to Earth.

I’m not sure what happened next, but it seems that Max then fell into the canyon, due to a complete failure of the footing system, which in turn seems to coincide with an EMP detected from inside Plummers Canyon. Said EMP has disabled all mobile and nearly all stationary platforms in site B on the surface.

Currently in orbit, unaffected, but need to investigate. Have not heard from Max in several hours. No instruments currently working on surface except for repeater beacon, which of course is useless, considering the circumstances, unless all I want are temperature readings.

Will monitor the situation for further developments.

[click]

They told me not to cultivate emotional attachments, but to be honest I think they wanted me to get attached to Max. I’ve got a temperament that can deal with being alone for insane amounts of time, but at some point even I start anthropomorphizing and – well, why else would they have emotion-aided voice emulation in a surface-model robot? I mean, it takes up an insane amount of processing power and I know what the limitations are on these things.

It’s like this story I once heard: back in the days when robots weren’t autonomous yet, there were these soldiers in a squad who were assigned a bomb-sweeping robot. I think it was in the 2000s middle east conflict cluster, but what happened was that they were trained to treat the robot as part of the team, since their lives depended on it, and when they came back to the US they proceeded to check the robot out and take it fishing with them because, they said, it deserved a break too.

Cute story, yes, but it also says something about us as people. A mute robot, in the days before voice emulation, was attributed intent to such a degree that otherwise perfectly capable people treated it as if it were conscious.

It happens all the damn time. Animism, they called it in tertiary – we model others using our own neural circuitry, so we suffer from everything-looks-like-a-nail syndrome and attribute mental states to everything we can get our hands on. My parents still swear at their computer when it won’t turn on, and the sad thing about that is it’s a 2015 model, not even a smidgen conscious. Stupid, but our ancestors used to say the same thing about rivers and trees too – dryads, nereiads, spirits of the forest, gods and hellfire…

Somehow, even though right now he’s probably completely burnt from the inside out due to that EMP, I want to ask if Max is okay. I’ve been talking with him the past few months, I know he’s got only the dimmest of sparks inside if anything at all, but I’m still worried.

Is it wrong for me to worry about something that can’t feel a thing? Even if he acts like he does?


	3. Descent

2039 August 9

Log entry [audio]

They kept me for days, it seemed. At first with interrogators and then with scientists, clipboards and x-rays and a lot of people with words that expressed concern and faces that expressed something else entirely.

They asked me a lot of things. They told me what they were doing to me, most of the time, and I told them about the incident with the Emitter, and they just looked at their papers and wrote it down in some sort of indecipherable shorthand. I think they figured out what kind of power I had even before I understood it.

And in between the days and days of featureless white rooms and no privacy, there was some girl they’d assigned to keep me, if not comfortable, at least nondestructive. Her name, apparently, was Mandy. She was of no particular origin that I could pin down, medium-skinned and dark-haired with brown eyes, dressed in nondescript but reasonably flattering suits. She came around daily, asking me about everything.

Unlike the others, she actually showed signs of caring about my welfare, and waved off any compliments as “just doing her job.” That’s probably why she was placed with me. I think I liked her, I still do, but it took me a long time to get past that aura of innocence of hers.

She apologized to me when I was told by the labcoats that if I wanted the Emitter out, I would die, as it had replaced most of my heart with a fusion reactor. What some of them wanted to do was vivisect me to figure out how it worked while I was alive, which I turned down.

And then there was me, in a boardroom somewhere with Mandy, some guards, and someone from the Department of Defense, and I was being briefed on someone in Russia who’d also gotten a hold of one of the Emitters and was in cahoots with the Russian government. The secretary told me this: I could fight for the United States government, and take down Russia before they and their knight decided to take over the world instead, or I could decline, and they would remove the Emitter and give it to someone more “deserving.”

What remained unsaid is that this would involve my death, but the implication was very clear.

So of course I agreed to fight for them, because I had to.

**\---- ******

What followed was a whirl of briefings, pieces of paper signed, clearances and meetings in underground bunkers, and then a flight to India which would connect to a stealth jet that would drop me off somewhere above Russia.

It seems funny now, the amount of red tape they had to put me through. I’d agreed to it, though, and that was what they’d hold against me if I stepped out of line. So I stayed within the lines and let them drag me through their program, because I sure as hell didn’t want to be dead.

The “villain” I was up against now called himself Chaos. He used to be a cosmonaut in Russia’s space program and they were now working with him on… something, I never quite caught what the project was about. To be entirely fair, I got the feeling that nobody else knew either.

Just as importantly, Malignance was now crowing about how he was getting the rest of the world to bow to his will. The United States sent a representative to his “base” and told Malignance that the country would surrender to him. The press release that followed recommended that every other country follow our lead. A few of the UN heeded this suggestion, and a couple other countries, but not everyone. Which Malignance ignored, trumpeting that the surrender was “worldwide” and that it was only a matter of time until everyone else surrendered.

What he didn’t know about this was that our surrender was a ruse, and I was now the main fulcrum of a highly classified effort of the United States government to overthrow him.

I learned later that Malignance had managed to hijack several major TV stations in the greater Washington DC area and transmit the kind of stereotypical villainous world takeover speech that made me increasingly uncomfortably aware of the idea that maybe I was the one in that comic book situation.

Not as that bewildered observer staring through the windows, nor as the hapless civilian that needed to be rescued from the clutches of whatever stupid situation or villain of the week. I was the hero.

**\---- ******

We’d been given away; I knew this almost as soon as I stepped off the plane. More specifically, as soon as I fell out of the huge hole in the plane that had been left by an anti-aircraft gun’s extremely lucky (or informed) shot.

The Gs rippled through my flesh as I stretched myself out to slow my fall. The pilot was probably already dead; a shell arced past me and sailed neatly through where he was, if he wasn’t already dead from exposure.

I could only save myself, and do what I was brought here to do.

I aimed for the nearest large flat surface, straightened up, and watched as Chaos was neatly lowered to the ground by tractor beams. He stood, and placed his hand to his ear, and nodded, possibly receiving a radio transmission…

Again, time folded in on itself as I stood, bending electricity to my will, but this time, Chaos retaliated effectively. A black hole formed behind me and I narrowly dodged its influence, firing a pulse of electricity at him.

Eventually, I stood atop Chaos as well. But I noticed something pulsating beside him: a remote, with a display that ticked down backwards from…

Oh. _Oh._

I scrambled for Chaos’ emitter, picked it out of his chest, and took to the air with his suit’s controls, just in time for a nuclear explosion to obliterate the ground I’d been fighting on.

  


* * *

  


2039 January 20

Log entry [audio]

Log entry of 2038 January 20, 04:09 UTC by Louise Jamison, in regards to the situation rapidly developing involving personal assistant designation [005-Max] in Plummers Canyon. Labels: Max comma Plummers Canyon comma Titan surface work end labels. Originally imported from log system aboard the SS Feynman.

We found Max’s locator beacon. I’m going moonside to find him. Don’t bother following me.


	4. Running

2039 August 10

Log entry [audio]

The resulting accusations of nuclear war were loud, but nobody actually retaliated, which is probably Malignance’s work. Probably because he at least wanted the United States military intact, so as to be able to take over the rest of the world. At least, that’s what Mandy told me she’d heard.

It makes sense, though. The US military at the time was still huge, considering that even the post-Obama drawdown was barely 10% of the actual military – I remember listening to the car radio as a kid, back when we had an FM radio but no satellite, hearing the pundits talking back and forth about how much the President was and wasn’t doing to “demilitarize” the US.

The next targets that had been picked out for me were in Japan, and Canada. The rest of the planning and training went accordingly. I learned that Shadow was patterned from the Japanese archetype of the samurai, that I could use the man’s honor against him. Psych was a parapsychologist’s dream given form: her suit’s abilities were best represented as psi powers.

The Emitters were becoming increasingly dangerous, but we seemed to be able to count on one thing: they all took the form of various archetypes in our culture. I joked about this – would we next see an animist? What about one from the military?

It was only later that I would learn how right I really was.

**\---- ******

Instead of having someone ferry me out to Japan in a shielded fighter jet, I insisted on flying out myself. I refused to endanger another pilot, given our circumstances, was what I told them, and they figured they couldn’t exactly afford to lose another shielded plane.

So it was one night that I was driven, incognito, off to the coast, and then jumped off the pier, turning on my suit at the last moment. I carried only the barest of loads – enough food and water to sustain me, in small pouches that could be kept inside Chaos’ few pockets.

I was glad for the engineered power outage that prevented anyone from seeing me leave. Less so for the continuing requests that I at least allow an entourage to fly with me. But I managed to wave them off eventually. What I didn’t wave off was a peck on the cheek from Mandy, who blushed when I smiled at her.

I checked my guidance software, straightened into a reasonably aerodynamic pose that had been worked out by my handlers, and settled down for the flight across the Pacific.

I stayed just inside the trailing edge of the night as I flew, and finally drew near to the small sliver of land off the Asian coast that still had one of the highest population densities on the planet.

It’s been years since anyone sneered at “Made in China” – low-cost manufacturing moved to Thailand and Indonesia, then to various African countries with water routes – but the Asian continent is still associated with, among other things, a 24-hour nightlife and lax safety regulations.

I picked out a stretch of coast that wasn’t too well-lit, touched down, and then skimmed just above land to the city we’d found Shadow in, where I switched back into my civilian clothes and walked next to a highway until I reached the city.

**\---- ******

Shadow met me outside the city at dusk that evening. I pointed out a patch of unobstructed ground, and he inspected it and nodded, then settled into his fighting stance – and a moment later, he had already come at me with a sword.

He was faster than the others had been; I dodged attack after attack, firing electricity where I could and flames where I couldn’t, narrowly avoided burning myself when I managed to fire an attack at the space I had to dodge to a moment later. I’d figured out how to use my electricity to stun another Emitter-wielder for several precious seconds, allowing me just enough time to shoot off another attack before the other could retaliate.

It was a hard fight, neither of us conceding, and then I realized that he hadn’t been stunned, he simply wasn’t moving anymore.

I leaned over him, wondering whether I should take his Emitter. If I didn’t take it someone else would and I’d have to fight whoever came next again; that much was made clear to me back in the days of talking strategy in that underground bunker. It still didn’t make me feel any better about killing people.

I took the Emitter, and watched his eyes snap open and then glaze over, and then I ran.

  


* * *

  


2039 January 20

Log entry [text]

He’s gone.

I went into the canyon, and found more unusual geological formations. Bricks. Bricks that led, on a pathway, to a temple. My first thought was that it was impossible that there could be a temple here – unless there were aliens building it, before the human race gained the ability of space travel. My own communications equipment was fried during my fall, leading me to suspect that the EMP is the temple’s way of protecting itself from intruders.

The second impossible thing I was confronted with was a hologram, given human form (at the time I didn’t know why; now I suspect Max sent over the idea of what a human looks like), asking me my name.

“…Louise… Jamison?” I stuttered, with no idea of whether the hologram could hear me or not.

The hologram withdrew for a moment, then presented me with an incredible story. The third impossible thing. A story of a group of heroes, of a planet named Arcon, of a set of Emitters that granted the wielders incredible powers that had been left behind by these lost heroes…

The race these Emitters were intended for is surely interbred, extinct, or evolved beyond recognition now.

The hologram then told me that someone wanted to meet me, and I was presented with a very angry Max –

“Why did you leave me!? You could’ve rescued me before now!”

I had nothing to do but run, and all at once Max had tackled me and was methodically disassembling my suit. Almost immediately my skin screamed from the freezing atmosphere, which I ignored only by force of will. The Titan atmosphere – even if not directly toxic to humans, nitrogen’s not exactly suitable for human breathing, considering that it isn't oxygen.

I held my breath, which would leave me about one minute of lucidity and another minute of life. If I didn't involuntarily gasp.

“You will call me Malignance!” And Max outlined that he was going to go back to Earth and get his revenge on the planet for humans not having enough altruism, and I kept my mouth clamped shut because I was already running out of air.

Apparently satisfied with what he had done, Max drove over me, leaving tracks across my arm – a final degradation? – and left.

I lay there, desperately wondering whether I could do anything, and absolutely convinced that this could not possibly be my fault.

And then the edges of reality faded, followed by the center, and then there was silence.

\----

I awoke to the hologram in the temple commanding that I _arise_.

The afterlife?

But why was I still lying here with the shreds of a spacesuit surrounding me and the mental fuzziness of acidosis –

I was being told to _arise_ , and logic be damned! –

I stared up at the hologram, trying to will my limbs to move under me to support me, and all at once, there was the sensation of a mind touching mine –

an unmistakeable sensation of determination –

the sense of a boon being given –

And an arc of blue light, and I was assailed simultaneously by pain and whiteness and the sharp tang of ozone.

“You still have time to stop him, but not long.”

I stood, and nodded, and walked outside, leaving the twists of my shattered spacesuit behind me, now wearing the identity of one Volta, the last defender of the human race.

And then I ran.


	5. Reasons

2039 August 11

Log entry [audio]

I fought Psych, and gained his Emitter, and on the flight back I learned by helmet radio that they’d found the other two. I was right, as to who they were.

I was less at ease myself as to whether I was doing the right thing. Fighting Chaos was one thing, he was attached to the Russian government, but the others!... How exactly was I going about convincing myself that killing people was a good thing simply because they told me to?

They knew I could break out if I chose to. They were keeping me in line with threats of legal action, which were meaningless to a suited superhero.

What I also knew was that I wanted Mandy to know, so she could choose to go with me if she wanted. Not immediately, but when she could gracefully give two weeks’ notice, I knew she valued the procedures.

I expected her to keep it private, and she proceeded to tell her boss, who proceeded to tell everyone, the upshot of which was that I was woken up late that night by two guards who wanted to take me back to interrogation.

I changed into my suit and knocked them out. I borrowed the suit off one of them, read the schedule stuffed into a pocket, and changed into the suit, calculating when the person I was impersonating came off work.

Then I walked out the front door before anyone realized I was gone.

About as soon as I’d left I realized how difficult it would be to go back again. It wouldn’t be a matter of trust and signed papers anymore; they’d most likely just yank the Emitter out of my body and give it to someone else, consent be damned.

I’d have to lay low while I figured out what, if anything, to do next.

I wish it was as simple as I made it sound.

**\---- ******

I walked along the highway, wondering how far it was to the next city, when one of the cars pulled up next to me.

The driver reached over and rolled down the passenger window and yelled “Hey!” at me. I stared.

The car was a beat-up old thing, a sedan with paint flecks of several colors dotting its frame, a broken rear window that had been clumsily sealed with duct tape and a large piece of what looked like a trash bag, and a grinning teenage boy in the driver’s seat, who wore a ragged t-shirt and was busily tapping away at an old-fashioned touch-screen rigid-frame smartphone, which he then held to his ear. “Hey, Liss, I won’t be there as soon as I thought I was, there was this guy walking down the highway that I thought needed a ride. Thanks. Love you, bye.”

I continued staring.

“Cat got your tongue?” he asked.

“I…” My mouth remained open.

“Look, I’ve got nothing to go to for the next hour, where are you going?”

“Anywhere. Just… away from here.”

“Can do, sir. You want in? I’d open the door for you, but this car’s so old the windows aren’t powered, let alone the doors.”

I grabbed the handle and opened the door, staring at hamburger wrappers on the passenger seat, some of which looked like they had been there since before McDonalds’ rebranding.

“Just toss them into the back seat, nobody sits there anyway. ‘Cept the dog, but he’s not in here right now.” The boy scooped some of the wrappers out of the seat and tossed them into the back of the car.

I followed, and stepped into the car, and closed the door, and stared at him as he merged back onto the highway. The boy reached for the tape deck on the dashboard, popped the spent cassette out, flipped it, and slid it back in, pressing the “Play” button with one fluid motion.

As the music came on, and we drove down the highway, I thought, and eventually ventured one question.

“Can you drop me off at a library?”

The boy broke off his humming to reply to me. “Sure.”

**\---- ******

Over the course of that drive, which ended up taking over three hours and ended with me being somewhere in Nevada – “there’s always cheap cash lodging in Reno, just in case” – the boy told me about his life. He was putting his older sister through college, he said, and when she made enough money afterwards she’d pay for him. His father was a mechanic, and had cobbled this car together out of parts left over from his business. He wanted to be a DJ. He wanted to move out into his own apartment.

He really hoped that whoever Malignance is, the guy wasn’t serious about trying to destroy all humanity, because he had promised his mother that he’d keep his siblings fed and clothed, and that at least one of them would be famous one day.

I listened, mostly silently.

Why was I fighting? At first it was a matter of not knowing what else to do. But given the alternative…

I didn’t want to destroy the human race. I wanted to save it.

But why? And what would I have to do, in order to get there?

The kid pulled into a parking lot and offered me the tape from inside his stereo system. “I don’t know who you are, but you seem like a good guy who needs to clear his head for a while. I did the same thing a couple years back. There’s a hostel up the street. My phone number’s on the tape if you need anything.”

I said thanks, and he drove off, back the way he came.

I unfolded my hands to look at the tape.

He had stuffed several hundred dollars inside it.

  


* * *

  


2039 January 31

Log entry [text]

It’s been not quite two weeks since… the incident, and I’m wondering if I did anything wrong.

Max was basically a talking toaster. A talking toaster designed to be able to voice communicate with me and do detailed work where I couldn’t go, yes, but a talking toaster. It doesn’t take much reflectivity at all to vaporize rocks and then see how fast the resulting molecules sizzle up from the surface. True, he had a basic global-workspace architecture to be able to report “important” findings to me, but even that’s not a guarantee of consciousness.

Which makes it all the stranger, exactly what he saw in me (and, by extension, humankind) that he hated enough to want to destroy us.

It’s going to take him a bit less than five months to get to Earth from here, and I can’t do anything while both of us are still in deep space. I’ll follow him, maybe try to get a few shots at his vessel if I can, and try to get him down to the bottom of Earth’s gravity well where humans have a design advantage.

Max was designed to work at about 0.4G; if you put him at 1G, that’s going to put a lot of stress on his internals. Not enough for him to break, but enough that it’ll slow him down and start some hairline fractures if he goes at high speed or lifts more than he’s rated for in full G’s.

That said, I’ll have to see when I get there what he’s going to do with the planet.

\----

I’ve looked through the logs. Immediately after the locator beacon reappeared, several hours before I got to it, he downloaded as much data as he could from our internal networks. Mission information, entertainment database, maintenance logs, the works. The only thing he didn’t get to was my own notes, and thank Newton for that.

The only thing I can conclude is that whatever he downloaded gave him a very unflattering picture of the human race. I like humanity because I’m part of it; presumably Max would have no such qualms. I decided to start investigating, considering I have the time anyway, and skimmed through most of the movies section.

There are several movies in the library that deal with humans shooting down machines in self-defense, or more specifically the defense of other helpless humans subjugated by the machine. For those of us who are _Homo sapiens _, the reason why someone’d do this is obvious. For a machine, or an alien? They’d see us killing things for no good reason (except maybe that they were keeping us docile). They’d see us as hairless apes whose sole advantage is that we’ve traded sticks and slingshots for guns and nuclear weapons.__

Add this to every other movie in the genre of science fiction and I wouldn’t be surprised if Max ended up seeing mankind as a species that is xenophobic, prone to war, and for whom innovation is more the exception than the rule. The scary thing is, this isn’t entirely false, either.

As far as I know, people are working on this, but… it could definitely be argued that, especially if other races exist in the universe, we’re liable to kill them instead of try to communicate, and thus it would be better for all involved if we just, let’s say, disappeared off the map.

I think otherwise, that we’re improving from who we once were. But even I’ll agree we’ve still got a long way to go. What I fight for is not the human race as it exists now, but what it could be.


	6. Past

2039 August 12

Log entry [audio]

I spent a couple days in Reno, walking back and forth between the hostel and the library several blocks away, reading about ethics and philosophy, and keeping track of the other Emitters via the news media. Not that they showed up much. I knew where they were, approximately, from the briefings I’d been in; but I didn’t know exactly. I resigned myself to going in blind, tactics-wise.

Something that went less unnoticed was the fact that the Emitter-wielders had established fiefdoms of various sizes (at least before their defeat; I notice they didn’t actually say anything about how they were defeated). The other thing that I was not told, that I found with research, was speculation – out-of-the-way speculation, but speculation nevertheless – that Malignance himself was the one who seeded the Emitters.

In between, I also wandered around the shelves, picking out books on philosophy and ethics and morality. I decided I liked utilitarianism. I decided that, should I have to kill, it could only be justified by saving the lives of more people.

I also decided that I wanted to make the world a better place than it already was, and that I had an advantage over most people in actually achieving this. I have a fusion reactor in my chest, a suit that runs off this fusion reactor and grants me superpowers, and a brain in my head.

I also decided that should I give up my life and Emitter, it would be to someone who would be able to do my job better than I could: someone who would be able to preserve the human race and required my powers to do it, and someone fully willing to stand up for their morality in the sense that I aimed to.

So, what would I need before I acted further? I needed more information.

On a whim, I bought myself several gallons of water and set out into the desert.

**\---- ******

The Mojave in summer is hot. The Mojave in summer, during the day, is blazing hot, hot enough that unprotected exposure without water will kill of dehydration within a day or so.

The Mojave in summer, at dusk and at night, still gives off the heat that was stored during the day in the sand grains, but it is cool enough to travel in. The sky is cloudless, thus letting the heat radiate out into the great heat sink in the sky. In the winter, it often ends up below freezing at night.

I found a small cave where the sand had half-blown-over the skeleton of what used to be a car, and settled down inside to change into the suits and see if they had any more information.

There were logs. There were many log files, some by normal (if weak-willed) people who had decided to pick up an Emitter, and were thus transformed or subtly nudged by Malignance’s influence into his minions. They were drunk on the pleasure of being vindictive towards people who had slighted them in the past. Most had committed murder before I got to them. All were thinking about it.

And then there were the logs of the previous Volta. A woman, Louise Jamison. She was the sole crewmember who stayed in orbit around Saturn in the exploratory missions of 2037, a relatively young woman who had committed to never returning to Earth. At the time of her disappearance, she had been investigating Titan, one of Saturn’s moons; and the logs filled in the story of what went next.

I realized that, in the temple, the Emitter of Volta had been left untouched by the psychic web that held the others together, such that if the other Emitter-wielders ever became drunk on their power there would be someone who could, in principle, single-handedly take the rest of the pantheon of heroes down.

I realized that the position I had been granted by the previous Volta, when the woman inside the suit was slipping away from life, was a responsibility as much as it was a gift. I had the responsibility of keeping other superheroes from becoming supervillains.

Louise had failed at this, if accidentally and narrowly, but one mistake could’ve caused the end of life on Earth.

It meant that I could not make a mistake.

The realization scared me more than it humbled me.

**\---- ******

I resolved that, as soon as I was finished with Malignance, I would re-distribute the Emitters to people who were capable of making their own decisions and knew what their morality was. Like Louise, whom I resolved to emulate, in most respects.

But there were still small-time villains left for me to fight.

Soothsayer turned out to be some quarter-African-American young woman on a volunteer trip to Africa’s warped idea of what tribal summons and powers would look like, if they were real. She put up a fight when you stood still, and was ineffective as soon as you realized you could dodge and weave. I switched to Shadow and cut her down while she charged her attacks. By praying to various imaginary animist spirits, of course.

I had about two hundred left of the money the teenage boy in the car had given me. I flew across the States that night, and touched down somewhere on the West Coast, somewhere in Oregon, where I represented myself as a backpacker.

The town wasn’t large; it hadn’t been touched by the swath of destruction that were Malignance’s lackeys. Still, the inhabitants were on edge; most of northern California was ruled by one Bionic, who from appearances seemed to be the last Emitter I was looking for.

  


* * *

  


2039 February 19

Log entry [text]

I can’t contact Earth without Max knowing. But I must contact Earth, because I have to warn them.

I think I’ll wait until a few days before we reach Earth.

Until then, I’ll have to be content with waiting, and plotting.

  


* * *

  


2039 April 2

Log entry [text]

You know, I’ve always been a bit of a loner.

I guess that’s why they put me around Saturn. I was reliable, I wouldn’t mind not having a videolink with my family daily, and there simply wasn’t enough room on this module for two.

But having no contact with anything sentient for months?

My mind might be going places.


	7. Future

2039 August 14

Log entry [audio]

I rocketed down to Bionic, which he apparently called himself, and only just bested him. Super-attacks are one thing. A huge gun is, in all honesty, probably the best way for a normal person to stop one of us Emitter-wielders, and of course Bionic had one mounted on his arm. Gatling, to be precise. As an aside, the inventor of the Gatling gun was a pacifist who wanted to “reduce the size of armies,” which he did end up doing. Only not in the way he intended to.

That was the end of the other Emitters. I took some time to rest and recover before I had to face Malignance. It was clear he knew that his supporters had been picked off one by one by an assailant, one that would definitely have an Emitter by now if he or she didn’t already.

It was me, obviously, but hearing him rage incoherently on the radio was… if not comeuppance, at least strangely satisfying in a way that bordered on schaudenfreude.

It’ll be a hard fight, but I think I’ll best him. I have practice, and he’s simply been puttering around in that lair of his. I also have a gun.

  


* * *

  


2039 May 3

Log entry [text]

Judging by Max’s boasts over radio, I am finding myself increasingly convinced that he’s found a way to do something to Earth from orbit.

As soon as we’re in the Earth gravity well, I’m going to take him out of orbit.

  


* * *

  


2039 August 20

Log entry [audio]

I think I know what I’m going to do next, after I fight Malignance.

Distribute the Emitters to people who are good and can use them, for one. Perhaps a worldwide police force. The scientific community’ll want one to look at, too. Cheap fusion power could do a lot for progress.

As for me?

I think I’m keeping Volta’s emitter for now, at least for a few years. I have no idea whether this thing is going to increase or decrease my lifespan, it’s too early to tell, but… I suppose, if it’s replaced my heart, it really shouldn’t be too much trouble to have a heart transplant, in the event that I want to step down. I hear cloned organs are just barely reaching viability stage.

And I’ll pick my successor myself, if I can.

But before then?

What I live for is not the human race as it exists now, but what it could be.

I think I’ll go public, and work from there…

[end]


	8. Epilogue: The Radio Transmission (Reprise)

Epilogue: radio transmission

2039 August 20

[broadcast]

__

_Hello, Malignance. This is Volta._

_I’m here to save the human race from you._

**_\----_ **

_I don’t know how you got your cynicism, but I believe that humans can change themselves. Yes, we are sometimes cruel and petty and xenophobic. Yes, sometimes we do terrible things to each other. But most of us don’t. And we have reason, and altruism, and we can choose to be better people than we used to be._

_For those of you who are listening at home: I’m not here to make life into a utopia. I am not going to run around and intimidate pickpockets like a superhero in a book would, either. I’m here to give you the time and breathing room that you need to fix society._

_I am Volta, and I never wanted to be your hero. But it is said that reluctant rulers are the only ones who cannot be corrupted._

_And I know, now, that my species is worth any sacrifice._

__

**Author's Note:**

> Notes:
> 
> The science is real. At least, more real than most science in the science-fiction genre is.
> 
> More specific references: [cement composition](http://cnx.org/content/m16445/latest/), [anthropomorphizing robots](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/05/AR2007050501009_pf.html), [acidosis from holding one's breath](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respiratory_acidosis), [Titan's atmosphere](http://www.astrobio.net/index.php?option=com_retrospection&task=detail&id=1755), [GWT (a possible reason for consciousness in humans)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Workspace_Theory), [humans in fiction are often ruthless](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HumansAreBastards), [the Mojave desert](http://sciences.unlv.edu/desertsurvivors/Pages/mojave.htm), [utilitarianism](http://www.utilitarianism.com/mill1.htm), [the inventor of the Gatling gun](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatling_gun#History).
> 
> Yes, I got course credit for writing fanfiction. You know, this is the kind of thing you can just ask about. The worst the instructor can do is say no.


End file.
